Wizard of Tuskegee

After decades of neglect, Booker T. Washington is the subject of a timely reappraisal


Up From History. Robert J. Norrell
(Harvard University Press, 508 pages, $35)

A century ago, the most consequential black person in America was a biracial man who had been abandoned by his father and raised by his mother, and who favored a nonconfrontational style of politics. Sound familiar?

Bettmann/Corbis

Booker T. Washington in 1906

Yet to the extent that Booker T. Washington (1856-1915) is remembered at all today, he is usually misremembered, which is a travesty. In 1881, Washington founded the Tuskegee Institute, a normal school in Alabama dedicated to educating recently freed slaves. He gained national prominence in 1895, after a famous speech in Atlanta where he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. The address would make him the central figure in American race relations for the next two decades.

Washington went on to advise four U.S. presidents and he dined at the White House with fellow Republican Theodore Roosevelt, a black first. His 1901 autobiography, "Up From Slavery," was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by a black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. Many of America's other moneyed men, including John D. Rockefeller and J.P. Morgan, were admirers and major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain and William Dean Howells sang his praises, the latter calling him "a public man second to no other American in importance."

For two generations after his death, Booker T. Washington remained widely appreciated. Scholarly assessments of his achievements noted that Washington "alone represented a well defined school of opinion which was supported by the rank and file of the race" (Horace Mann Bond). And that "no president of a republic, no king of a country, no emperor of a universal domain of that day approached anywhere near doing as much for the uplift of humanity as did Booker T. Washington" (Carter G. Woodson).

Numerous schools, parks, streets and black-owned businesses were named in Washington's honor. He was the first black to have his likeness appear on a U.S. postage stamp and commemorative coin. In 1942, a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the 100th anniversary of Washington's birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.

But Washington's star began to dim in the 1960s, when the style of civil-rights advocacy was given over to protest, condemning authority and challenging the status quo at every turn. The thrust of Washington's message was self-improvement. His focus was the development of the black population of the rural South. His unwillingness to practice protest politics, however, has earned him the scorn of many modern-day critics, who dismiss him as too meek in his dealings with whites.

• Excerpt from "Up From History"

In "Up From History," a compelling biography, Robert J. Norrell restores the Wizard of Tuskegee to his rightful place in the black pantheon. Just as important, Mr. Norrell explains how ideological imperatives can cloud clear thinking, even among historians who should know better. We might forgive John Lewis, the 1960s civil-rights activist and current congressman, for suggesting that Washington deserved to be "ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America." Mr. Lewis, after all, earned his fame in a confrontational moment in American race relations. But when influential historians like John Hope Franklin, Rayford W. Logan and C. Vann Woodward -- all of whom wrote about Washington after World War II -- disparage the man, refusing to assess him fairly within the context of his time, something is amiss.

[Up From History] Shira Kronzon

Woodward -- who died in 1999, having inspired a generation of academic historians of the South -- faulted Washington for not attacking the "prejudices and injustices of the caste system and the barbarities of the mob (subjects he rarely mentioned)." And Woodward sneered: "The businessman's gospel of free enterprise, competition, and laissez faire never had a more loyal exponent than the master of Tuskegee." Woodward also criticized Washington's hostility to unions and close ties to people like Carnegie. In Woodward's view, according to Mr. Norrell, Carnegie "had perpetrated a weak, colonial economy on the South."

"Woodward," Mr. Norrell writes, "surely knew that throughout his career Booker was fighting a defensive battle to save black education from official abandonment. But the historian refused to grant that much black education would not have existed but for the northern philanthropy that Washington promoted. To have acknowledged the good works of the rich men would have undermined his argument about the evil influence of big corporations on the South."

Mr. Norrell, a history professor at the University of Tennessee, says that this "present-mindedness of historians writing about race" is a function of the fact that many had themselves been activists and admired the accomplishments of civil-rights protest. "A presumption entered the thinking and writing that protest was correct," he writes, "and for most the only legitimate, means of improving minority conditions. By the mid-1960s Washington was understood to have been the enemy of activism, the Uncle Tom who delayed the day of freedom."

Aside from the intellectual dishonesty of judging Washington from the vantage point of modern times, it also happens that many of these assessments are wide of the mark. Far from condoning the racial injustices of his day, Washington said: "It's important and right that all privileges of the law be ours." He believed that "political activity alone" would not bring black progress, but he quietly financed court challenges to Jim Crow laws. Mr. Norrell notes that Washington made public protests against "lynching, disenfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation, and discrimination by labor unions." And in 1899 he wrote: "I do not favour the Negro giving up anything which is fundamental and which has been guaranteed to him by the Constitution of the United States."

Many criticisms of Washington in more recent decades have echoed those of his contemporary black nemesis, W.E.B. Du Bois, the political activist and social critic who belittled Tuskegee as "the capital of the Negro nation." Where Washington wanted to focus on the achievement of self-determination through independent black schools and businesses, Du Bois argued that civil rights were more important because political power was necessary to protect any economic gains.

Much has been made of this rivalry, but the relevant point is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not goals. Washington never renounced equal rights, and Du Bois acknowledged the need for vocational education as a means to self-improvement. Putting their differences into proper perspective is yet another way that "Up From History" serves as a useful corrective.

Jason L. Riley is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W10